Constituting the Nation in Theodor Fontane’s Vor dem Sturm

Abstract

It is now 150 years since the founding of the modern German state, the so-called “unification” of 1871, which resulted from both long-standing national aspirations, often with a democratic character as in the Revolution of 1848, and Otto von Bismarck’s political designs for a more conservative political structure.1 The German victory in the Franco-Prussian War led to the crowning of the Prussian King Wilhelm as the first Kaiser of the new German Reich. Now, more than three decades into the Berlin Republic, a different unification that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German political and media …